[2]
For my own part I regard the practice of rhetoric which so many have adopted in the past and still
follow to-day, as either no art at all, or, as the Greeks
call it, ἀτεχνία (for I see numbers of speakers without the least pretension to method or literary training rushing headlong in the direction in which
hunger or their natural shamelessness calls them);
or else it is a bad art such as is styled κακοτεχνία.
For there have, I think, been many persons and
there are still some who have devoted their powers
of speaking to the destruction of their fellow-men.
Quintilian. With an English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1920.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.